At the time much of the footage for the Oscar-nominated documentary Burma VJ was being shot, its director, Anders Østergaard, wasn’t even in the same hemisphere. Wanting to open a window on the closed country of Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar), the Danish-based filmmaker struck up a groundbreaking remote collaboration... more

At the time much of the footage for the Oscar-nominated documentary Burma VJ was being shot, its director, Anders Østergaard, wasn’t even in the same hemisphere. Wanting to open a window on the closed country of Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar), the Danish-based filmmaker struck up a groundbreaking remote collaboration with a network of underground citizen reporters, who risked torture, imprisonment and death as they shot then smuggled footage beyond the military dictatorship’s closely guarded borders.

The documentary was originally intended to be a half hour short, profiling a 27-year old video journalist (or VJ) known as Joshua who worked behind Burma’s barbed-wire veil of silence and against the strict media embargo enforced by its military government (which came to power after a coup in 1962). Using a pseudonym to protect his identity, Joshua coordinated illicit on-the-ground coverage for the Democratic Voice of Burma, a non-profit news organization based in Norway. However, when Burma’s ruling junta abruptly ceased subsidies on fuel, which caused the price to skyrocket, destabilizing an economy that was already among the world’s poorest, Joshua and Østergaard’s project took on a far greater significance.

Thousands of the country’s Buddhist monks took to the streets in the latter part of 2007, leading what developed into widespread protests against the intransigent regime. Armed with their wits and hand held video cameras, Joshua and his crew of VJs documented the saffron uprising and the Burmese government’s brutal retaliation to it from the front lines. It was the first time in a generation that the people had dared challenge their leaders, but this was very different to the last uprising in 1988. Footage captured by Joshua and his team was beamed around the world. Vivid images of soldiers viciously beating monks in the street in broad daylight were broadcast via all the major new networks, putting Burma – albeit briefly – at the top of the United Nation’s political agenda. With no room for deniability, Burma’s military leaders were shamed into making concessions. And then the world’s attention moved on.

Fast-forward to 2010, with promises broken and hard fought concessions reneged on, it might be easy for Joshua and his fellow Burmese citizens to feel despondent. However, with Burma VJ, a documentary that combines original footage with dramatic recreations, Joshua and Østergaard hope to raise awareness for the ongoing plight of the Burmese people. At the start of this month their cause was given a massive boost with an Academy Award nomination for their film in the category for Best Documentary feature.

SuicideGirls caught up with Østergaard, a Danish filmmaker who was previously best known for Tintin and Me (a 2003 documentary about comics writer and artist Hergé). Over coffee we talked about Burma VJ's dramatic journey from the impoverished streets of Burma to Hollywood’s glittering Kodak Theater, and what the film’s Oscar nomination means for a new generation of citizen journalists and for those fighting oppression around the globe.

Nicole Powers: How did this group of underground reporters come to your attention? Did you discover them while visiting Burma?

Anders Østergaard: I was coming totally from the outside. There was a Danish producer who kept talking about Burma, that we should do something about it years ago. I had practically no clue about the country, to my embarrassment, but I was also intrigued by the fact I knew so little. Which has an actual explanation; the country's been closed for 50 years almost.

Out of that simple curiosity we started discussing how to go about it. We realized if we went in ourselves in the traditional way it would end up being a film about the crew itself somehow. Because it would be about all the difficulties, the people we couldn't film and the places we couldn't go.

We were looking for some other approach. Realizing that there were people inside, citizen reporters making their own stories was extremely intriguing because they could go places I could never go. And their own story, of course, would tell us a lot about life in Burma.

NP: So you did this project without ever having to go to Burma?

AØ: I never went - well later on I did. As we prepared for the film we approached the Democratic Voice of Burma, the people who organize it in Oslo. They sent us to Bangkok to meet several reporters who came out for camera training. That's where I found Joshua, the protagonist in the film. But that was well before the uprising. The idea was to base the film on their footage, on their experience, and their point of view. To work with them as subjects who are looking at the world. On the narration [we'd planned that they'd] explain how they perceive the world, the country as they shot it. That was the nature of the original project and then it developed into a major political thing because of the uprising.

NP: So these citizen journalists would upload footage and send it to you via the internet?

AØ: Basically, yeah.

NP: Did you then call them and debrief them as you went along.

AØ: No. As a matter of fact I left them pretty much to themselves at the time of the uprising. There was no way I could interfere. They were too busy and under too much pressure safety-wise, security-wise, so I couldn't interfere with their work at the time. I just sat waiting until the whole thing had settled and then we collected their footage and put together a film.

NP: The film features the footage that was shown by news organizations such as the BBC around the globe. Did you assist in getting that footage to the various news outlets?

AØ: No. I didn't have a direct role as an activist or partisan as such. They were such skillful people at what they were doing that I didn't have to do that. I could basically just sit back and wait for the material to turn up some months later. It was quite deliberate in retrospect, [given] the chaos of the time. It was a good thing for the film that we didn't rush about and get in the way.

NP: Or put them in danger.

AØ: Which we would have done if we'd have stayed at the safe house where Joshua was based in the film. We would have jeopardized his safety.

NP: This hands off style of documentary making, that alone is quite revolutionary.

AØ: Maybe so. It's an alliance if you like between what they do and what I do, and that's how we perceived it all the way through.

NP: And it was someone in Oslo that put you in touch with Joshua?

AØ: Yes, the editors at the Democratic Voice of Burma. That is where they're based.

NP: As the uprising was going on, what were your personal thoughts?

AØ: Well I was following the mood swings, if you like. It seemed to be very optimistic, a very hopeful thing at the beginning. We were [hoping] like everybody else that they would get something out of this, that this would lead to some change, which it didn't of course. We were just going through everything they were going through, the hope and the despair.

NP: You get the feeling from the film that they were so busy capturing footage that there was little time for them to react to what was happening at the time.

AØ: Oh no, they were certainly distraught about what they were witnessing. It was just as emotional for them as anyone else that was there. But I don't think they had that much time to discuss it at the time. I think somehow the film turned out to be a little bit of therapy for them because they had a chance to live out all the things that they were going through emotionally in the dialog.

The thread of the film is actually all these cell phone conversations, that's actually what builds the dramatic structure of the film. That was reenacted by the protagonists half a year later. It was based on the conversations they would have had at the time but were obviously not recorded, they didn't have the resources. And it was also a safety issue too, to record stuff like that. So that was self-constructed I would say. I just asked them to quite simply ad-lib: "You're on this and that date and this is the situation, you're calling each other, what are you saying?" They had an amazing ability to go back to those situations and those feeling they had at the time.

NP: But there are some moments when there's genuine panic in their voices, when they're on their phones on camera at the time,.

AØ: There are bits of authentic original [cell phone conversation] footage also.

NP: Like when Joshua has to hide his camera in a bag, and all you see is a virtually black screen, but you can still hear him talking on the phone.

AØ: There are several situations like that, authentic bits which inspired us to extend the cell phone element into a full dramatic structure. So some of the [cell phone audio] moments are very real and from the moment it happened.

NP: Can you talk about how they were actually getting the footage out of the country?

AØ: The [military government] soon realized that it was major problem for them, that [the citizen journalists] were uploading material on the internet. Then [the military government] closed it down, so [the citizen journalists] had to resort to satellite uploads. There were lots of people trying to report and communicate with the outside world, but only these guys had the resources like the satellite phones to actually keep the whole thing alive.

NP: Was that kind of equipment getting air-dropped in?

AØ: I can't go into details about how they got it installed, but they had it in place.

NP: Once you got hold of the footage and started putting the film together, did you meet up with Joshua and the other reporters again?

AØ: Yes, I met with all of them -- well not all of them but a bunch of them -- about half a year later in Thailand. That's where we sat down and relived the whole thing in cell phone conversations or the reenacted scenes in the safe house where Joshua is running about trying to keep track of his colleagues. All that stuff was done later on.

NP: When the footage reached the outside world, it did bring about some change, but obviously ultimately not as much as they'd hoped. The United Nations did get involved, but nothing really has been resolved.

AØ: Well there are many levels to it, because for the country it was a tragedy, but for what they were doing it was a huge breakthrough. It was a triumph that they were able to live up to the occasion, to supply the world with footage. I mean you're talking about twelve people with no formal journalistic education, no resources at all -- they would move about on buses or just on their bare feet. Just the logistics of being in the right place at the right time, and getting the material delivered, and getting it uploaded, and getting it to the outside world was a massive achievement given the circumstances. So for them, these young guys, it was a triumph, a victory that they were able to do that.

NP: I guess the victory was twofold. It was amazing that the demonstrators were even able to openly protest in the streets because that was the first time that had happened in a generation, and then to be able record it and show it to the world so there's no level of deniability...

AØ: Exactly. Even for the country it was very hopeful in a way. For example they were quite worried about the next generation, the 20-somethings; Would they have forgotten all about politics because they didn't experience the last uprising in '88? They only knew the regime's reality. There was a general worry that the whole tradition of '88 would be totally forgotten. This was to prove that they can be politicized as well, that they will also understand that this is worth pursuing.

NP: That's interesting, that idea of multiple generations who have only known life under a dictatorship, who have never experienced first hand the freedoms that they're missing.

AØ: Sure. But it does suggest that the need for freedom to express yourself and all those things are so instinctive that anyone will pick it up at some point sooner or later. That's at least the notion I get out of this.

NP: These reporters come from a generation who had been powerless. Just the act of defiance, of recording the events must have been empowering.

AØ: Absolutely, and I think that's how it felt for them. They really could do something, even if they couldn't change the regime, they could make a difference. They could tell the generals if they kill people we will put you on TV. And there's lots of assessments that that actually made a difference, that that brought the death toll down from what it would have been. Compare, in '88 there were thousands of people killed, but the fact that this was televised so thoroughly might have made the whole thing less violent than it would have been otherwise.

NP: I guess we'll never know how many people were saved by the citizen reporters' actions, but it's a profound thought.

AØ: It's legitimate speculation.

NP: Have you heard much from the members of Joshua's reporting network since?

AØ: We've been constantly in touch with Joshua [who now lives in exile in Thailand]. He's actually been traveling with the film. Because he was in exile he was able to come along. We've been here, and we've been to Canada with him, and he keeps us updated. Out of the original group, three have gone to prison. One has actually been released not more than two months ago. But then, on the other hand, somebody who worked later on, on another thing, has just got 20-years so they're still being very heavily pursued. It's maybe even more difficult than it was before to do what they've been doing.

NP: Has Joshua spoken to the press in person? Do you still have to keep his identity secret?

AØ: Yes, we have to go about that all the time, he can't make public appearances as such. We have to make interviews without his face shown, we had to go through all those precautions.

NP: So what's next for Joshua and for you.

AØ: Well Joshua is quite simply rebuilding the network, with his role in the organization to recruit new people. They've managed to get 80 new reporters, which is quite impressive considering the risks that these people are going to take.

NP: I understand when Joshua first picked up his camera, his original goal was just to document everyday life in Burma; He had no idea that he'd be shooting, and making, history.

AØ: No, he couldn't imagine how far it could be taken...I think he was always aware that what he was doing was a political thing, it's just that he didn't realize that it could have the effect it could, that it could have the impact that it could. I guess that's what he learned -- his colleagues as well -- that this is really a political factor. And the awareness of what media means, of what documentation means, that fact they could put the issue on the world agenda in a whole different way because we have this footage to explain what's going on. Suddenly Burma is a tangible thing. It wasn't before. It was quite abstract, something you had to try to imagine, now you can see what it's all about.

NP: And Joshua has also inspired a wave of activist citizen journalists around the world.

AØ: Yes. That's the good news.

NP: So what's been happening with this documentary?

AØ: It's been traveling for a year now. It's been all over the place. We've been very busy trying to take a grass roots approach to distribution to have screenings everywhere possible. We sent the DVDs to anybody for free who would have some kind of serious purpose with it, be it a university screening in Malaysia, or a Burma committee in Sweden, or even private people who are just keen to show it to their neighbors. We've had hundreds and hundreds of screenings in this way, and we very much believe in that kind of approach.

NP: If people reading this want to arrange a screening, how do they go about it?

AØ: They should just get in touch with the Magic Hour Films company in Copenhagen who will send them a DVD.

NP: How are you funding that?

AØ: Well, it is an expense, but on the other hand sending a DVD is a relatively cheap thing to do which has promotional value. Seen from our perspective, it seems to be worthwhile to do that...It's intriguing that you can reach people so cheaply these days, that you can think about distribution in a new way.

And we didn't have a dilemma between the political interests and the commercial interests. That would have been unbearable, to go make this film and then try to be restrictive about the rights, denying its natural life as a political statement. Of course we've been looking at ways of combining this and making that best of both interests.

NP: You have some big new regarding the Academy Award nomination. When did you first hear about it?

AØ: Oh, the very second [the list] was released. I was calling in to the production company office to follow the whole thing live. We had Danish television there and it was a big deal -- just the prospect of a nomination.

NP: What does this mean for the film? Obviously even the nomination will bring more attention to Burma VJ?

AØ: It'll prolong the lifespan of the film. A documentary often dies out in the course of a year, something like that. This will bring it a second life, bring it to new audiences who may be wary of the documentary genre. The Oscar [nomination] may communicate that this is a film that works as a movie, and will entertain and involve you. But what is interesting is the aspect of how it boosts morale inside the country.

NP: I was going to bring that up. I mean this is a huge deal for Burma, for Joshua and for citizen journalism in general.

AØ: Absolutely. The Burmese people, that's what they're telling me all the time. The film, obviously you can't see it on state television, but it's out there on the black market, it's going from hand to hand. It's being copied and lots of people have seen it -- everybody is following this. For them it's a big deal to have their country involved in an Oscar nomination. It has so many emotional aspects because they are so damn scared of being forgotten by the rest of the world.

NP: I assume you've spoken with Joshua since the announcement. What was his reaction?

AØ: He's so excited, of course, as everybody else. I think he tries to stay cool in a sense that he wants to look after his day-to-day business and not get too involved in the glamour. But he is excited, clearly excited. That's the wonderful thing about this project, that we are all on the same side. I don't need to have a guilt trip about being here because I know it means something to the people involved.

NP: Will Joshua be able to make it out for the ceremony?

AØ: Possibly not. He has endless visa and passport problems. That's not so easy. It's not something we can count on unfortunately. But since he's in Thailand, he will at least follow us minute by minute.

NP: Well I'll keep everything crossed for you, and just wanted to say congratulations.

AØ: Thank you very much.


Go to BurmaVJMovie.com for more info on the film and for details of upcoming screenings.

Growing up in the shadow of Disneyland, artist and illustrator Camille Rose Garcia spent a lot of time contemplating the reality of fantasy and the fantasies that make reality palatable. Just as the white paint flaked and the wood decayed in the once-perfect picket-fenced suburbs that surround Disney's... more

Growing up in the shadow of Disneyland, artist and illustrator Camille Rose Garcia spent a lot of time contemplating the reality of fantasy and the fantasies that make reality palatable.

Just as the white paint flaked and the wood decayed in the once-perfect picket-fenced suburbs that surround Disney's Orange County Fantasyland, on canvas and in print, Garcia's brightly colored fairytale tableaus are juxtaposed with darker elements, as real world forces impinge on her perfect dream worlds.

Much of Garcia's work explores the lie of the American Dream, the loss of it, and how the masses are self-medicating to deal with the aftermath. Though these themes are adult in nature, the on-the-surface beauty of Garcia's art appeals to a younger audience on a more basic level. So when Harper Collins decided to revisit Alice's Adventures in Wonderland amid renewed interest in Lewis Carroll's curious tale (which was first published in 1865), Garcia was a natural choice to re-imagine the visual element of the book.

SuicideGirls spoke with Garcia to find out what she saw when she followed Alice and a certain well-dressed (and late) White Rabbit down Carroll's most unusual rabbit-hole.

Nicole Powers: Where are you calling in from?

Camille Rose Garcia: I'm in Northern California. I lived in LA forever but we moved up here a few years ago, and I live in the middle of the woods.

NP: In your own Wonderland.

CRG: Yes, in my own Wonderland. We're almost to Oregon, seven hours north of San Francisco.

NP: What made you want to illustrate Alice's Adventures In Wonderland?

CRG: Actually, the editor from Harper Collins, Liz [Elizabeth Viscott Sullivan], gave me a call. It was kind of her idea. It was already in my head from a couple of years ago, I'd been talking with Disney about doing something with Alice In Wonderland. So it made it a lot easier since I already had an idea of the characters I wanted to do. When she called me I thought that's perfect timing to do the book. I had some other projects lined up but I was like, I can swing it. I can do it. I can pull some late nights.

NP: What do you personally see down the rabbit hole in Carroll's story? And what wasn't fulfilled for you by the original illustrations?

CRG: Well the original illustrations by [John] Tenniel have always been some of my favorites. I have three copies of the book here because I collect children's stories. That's one of my favorite stories because it's actually a real dark story. She falls down the hole and no one is really nice to her at all. Pretty much every character she encounters, they're not really on her side. So re-reading it I realized I could do a little bit darker of an interpretation than the original illustrations. Because you got a little bit of a hint of the stuff that was going on, but not really [a sense] of the extent of it. There's a lot of drug references as well, so I wanted this one to be psychedelic referencing that.

NP: Talk about some of the visual vocabulary used in the illustrations.

CRG: Well I did want to reference '60s psychedelia. I'm not sure where that comes from, although it's probably the mushrooms.

NP: There are mushrooms in virtually all of your images.

CRG: Yeah. I think a lot of bands and things in the '60s seemed to reference Alice In Wonderland -- I guess Jefferson Airplane, the famous song "White Rabbit." There seemed to be a lot of '60s crossover with the psychedelic imagery, so the colors were very bright, kind of really happy, a lot of purples and pinks and yellows.

I was listening to T-Rex and David Bowie. They're more '70s, but to me I think of the '70s Bowie as very psychedelic. I wanted those colors, but then the characters themselves are a little darker, a little meaner, a little more severe. You have this contrast of the really super bright drug references with this more gothic element.

NP: The way you depict Alice, she could be a kid or she could be a 35-year old. I'm looking at the frame for the opening poem "All In A Golden Afternoon." You've got Alice looking beyond drowsy, almost like she's suffering the aftereffects of a party the night before, and she's surrounded by love hearts and you've drawn a bottle near her, nestled in the grass, that looks suspiciously like booze.

CRG: Yeah, she's definitely a substance abuser. But that was something I found interesting from the original illustrations, you can't really figure out how old she is, and in a lot of different illustrations of Alice over the years they've made her a little girl, they've made her older. In the animated Disney version she is more like 18, she's a lot older. I was kind of playing with that. In one version I had her older and a little more tarted up, a little sexier. But I didn't want to get into those issues.

NP: Sexualizing a children's story.

CRG: Yeah. I do have a lot of child fans. I thought there's going to be a lot of 7-year olds looking at this. I wanted to keep the drug and alcohol references in there because I thought it was important, but not [go] totally over-the-top. I made her kind of 12, on the verge of being an older person, but it comes down to 'Do you give her boobs or not?'

NP: She's got quite a puffy top on her dress so you can't really tell.

CRG: Yeah, 'cause when I was drawing that I thought, 'Would she have cleavage?' Not really. That was the ultimate problem; would she have boobs or not? But she's definitely drinking, so I guess she's like a 12-year old boozer.

NP: It is the interesting dichotomy with Carroll's story. On the surface it's a fairytale for children, but it works on another level as a drug-fueled nightmare for adults. And the perception of the story changes as you grow. Do you remember the time when you saw it through more innocent eyes? And how did your perception change?

CRG: I do remember. I remember reading the story and looking at the original illustrations, and it was one perception, like, "This is weird." I loved the rabbit from a very child-like perspective. Then being a teenager and listening to a lot of music and taking mushrooms and doing all this stuff, and also going to Disneyland, they have a whole Alice in Wonderland ride, there's all these layered references from my druggy teen years. Also realizing how many bands and other people are referencing the darker stuff.

But only upon when I took this project on, and re-read this story again, very intimately, trying to find more visual clues, [did I] realize really how dark it is. It's like a really bad trip. The Queen threatens to behead her at one pint, and they're drugging her, really there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. So from an adult perspective it kind of reminds me more of the old Germanic folk tales where the kids were always getting killed or ran off into the forest or actual bad things happened to them.

NP: In America, we tend to want to wrap our kids up in petal pink and powder blue and tell them fluffy fairy tales, but in reality children's own tastes are far more macabre, which I think is part of the appeal of Alice. The reality of Alice's Wonderland is quite nightmarish, but kids will happily giggle as the queen shouts, "Off with their heads." But you never get to see the consequences. I always wondered about the resulting pile of decapitated bodies.

CRG: I feel like American culture in general is very much afraid to show children anything outside of a puppy/marshmallow SpongeBob world. But in the fairytales throughout history it was very important to teach people consequences. Oftentimes kids would die at the end or they'd get shoved in the oven, or they'd be beheaded or turned into a frog. There were always these much darker things happening and I feel like in the American versions of a lot of children's stories, that element is sanitized out.

And I think the time we're living in now, it's really important for kids to be aware of [the fact that] there a bad things in the world happening. There are things to be scared of, but that's how you grow and mature. You have to face your fears, so I wanted to keep some of that darkness in there...People underestimate kids a lot in terms of what they can handle. I know there are things that are appropriate and not, but I think American culture in particular is very sterilized when it comes to children's literature.

NP: But we also mollycoddle our adults. Take for example the gulf war and the policy of hiding the dead and the wounded from us. We don't see the consequences, the bodies of those we've killed. Nor do we see the bodies of our own troops.

CRG: I think again with American culture we're really infantilized. We're like an infantile culture that has an inability to deal with bad news, and that is prevalent across the board in America. Even talking about anything real, or showing somebody an image of something real that's happening in the world, people don't want to deal with it. They don't want to see it, they don't want to talk about it, and I think it's really kind of psychotic to not address everything that's actually happening in the world, to not even want to know about it.

NP: Yeah, I was watching a clip today of the cast of Jersey Shore being interviewed on a so-called news show.

CRG: Oooh, I was just looking at that and I was thinking I can't believe that this guy is somebody that has to be in my consciousness...

NP: That's all a part of Hollywood and the mainstream entertainment industry in general being this Wonderland for the world that distracts us from the dark stuff that's going on that we should actually be paying attention to.

CRG: It seems too that the darker the world gets the more people really do have a need for that distraction. I mean Michael Jackson's death went on for three or four months on CNN to the exclusion of everything else happening in the world. And that's just not very balanced.

NP: I know you grew up not far from Disneyland, which itself has many parallels to Carroll's story. On the surface it's this world famous wonderland, but the flipside is, if you grew up near it, it just became this place for bored local kids to go and get fucked up on drugs.

CRG: It was really the best place to take acid. And the contrast here I think is this idea of suburbia as the safest place, the happiest place. That's the thing to achieve in Western culture, Disneyland being at the pinnacle, the cherry on top of the happiest, best, safest place to be. When, in reality, to have a world that is paved over in concrete with all indigenous plants and animals removed and replaced by fake plants and animals, that's not something the world should strive towards as a collective goal. So there definitely are two sides to that.

NP: Throughout your various books, collections and exhibitions (The Saddest Place On Earth, Tragic Kingdom, etc.), your work has very much been influenced by growing up in the shadow of Disneyland. And it seems to have had a profound effect on a whole generation of kids from Orange County. How did the OC, this perfect vision of 1950's suburbia, become such a Tragic Kingdom?

CRG: For a longtime I had real strong ideas about relationships between suburbia and fascism, having this über perfect goal to be cleansed of anything strange or different. There's a real xenophobia in Orange County that's very dark.

NP: But then you look at Disney movies, it's taken until 2010 for them to release a movie starring a black princess.

CRG: The image of perfection in fantasy and fairytales is it completely removed of multicultural things. In the '70s we had Sesame Street that was trying to introduce that, but I think for the most part, especially in Disney and Southern California and the white middle class, their idea of perfection didn't involve any other cultures. Disney did travel to other cultures, but you can see how we sort of worship Germanic castles and all these European influences.

NP: And if you look at most of the set-in-suburbia dramas and soap operas on TV, they set up very unreal expectations. For example in Desperate Housewives, Mike Delfino is a plumber yet he lives in this gorgeous, million dollar plus suburban home. Kids have grown up with this promise of what suburban life should afford that they have no way of attaining for themselves.

CRG: Yes, and it's already crumbling because their parents are now in foreclosure and can't afford those houses. It's kind of like the collective fantasy of suburbia. It's not real. It's not working. This façade is falling apart. These kids that have grown up in those cultures aren't prepared at all for what's coming, for fighting over resources globally and global economic collapse. They're just not prepared at all for any of that.

NP: Talking of the American fairytale that's come crashing down, I was reading an interview you did that was first published on Sept 16, 2006 on a website called Crown Dozen where you very specifically predicted the global economic crash:

CRG: Well I had a lot of other people I was reading that were talking about it long before it happened. All these bankers, now the big lie is "Oh, we didn't know." They knew. It was written about extensively. They knew exactly what was happening and they knew how they were going to get their money out. It just becomes part of the collective lie. That's the thing, I think American culture is just a series of collective lies presented to us.

NP: I agree. When people were signing these mortgages that they never had any prospect of being able to afford, they were signing on the back of a fairytale. They were sold a fairytale.

CRG: Yeah, and along with the mortgage you get the anti-depressant drugs. It kind of reminds me a lot of Philip K. Dick stories where the characters, they're taking these drugs because they're living on Mars and they want to pretend they're living on earth. It's like you need the drug to continue the fantasy of the lie. You can't have the lie without the anti-depressants.

NP: I guess that's what you explored in your 2008 Ambien Somnambulants show.

CRG: Yeah, exactly. The sleepwalking. Interestingly, going back to Alice, I found it actually really amazing when I thought about it, why there are so few female heroes in literature and children's literature - especially of that time period. Here was this young girl that had an opinion, had her ideas about things, and wasn't being railroaded over by adults or anyone in the story. I hadn't really though about that before. And that's really an interesting perspective. I bet it didn't come out of that period very often. Young girls were supposed to be seen and not heard, and not have opinions.

NP: That's part of Alice's charm, she doesn't say what's she expected to say. The big end is that she stands up to the kangaroo court and tells her elders and those in authority that they're "Nothing but a pack of cards."

CRG: Yeah, and flips them over, creates anarchy and runs off.

NP: The saddest thing about that ending for me is that that play on words is lost because most people today don't realize that "card" back then was another word for "joker" or "fool."

CRG: Yes, the puns are very specific, and a lot of them are English specific. Like I didn't know what "whiting" was, that it was also a fish. Certain things are very English and from the Victorian era. Upon re-reading it closer it was like, "Oh, OK! I never got that part." Re-reading it very closely was a joy, to think about it on a deeper level, of all those other themes going on.

NP: Children are taught to blindly respect authority, and the great thing about Alice is that she doesn't. We need to encourage that more. Going back to your Ambien Somnambulants idea that many of us sleepwalk through life, I always consider apathy to be the greatest facilitator of evil.

CRG: Wow, yeah. Just doing nothing.

NP: But then kids are taught that as long as something is presented by someone in authority, you're not really supposed to challenge it.

CRG: Yeah. That's the thing, again going back to her challenging and being so opinionated, it kind of ties into the feminist movement of the '60s and '70s. All that, all of the bra-burning and now we're at this point where young people, they don't have a lot of role models still. Even if you're great singer you still have to be half naked. You have to have that thing too to be famous. That is the message.

NP: I guess if Mattel made Alice she would have impossibly large breasts.

CRG: She's have huge boobs, but she'd be 12. [laughs] It's like, non-threatening but hot. She would never be a '50s buxom kind of [female]. That's the other thing, thinking of the females of the '50s that were powerful but bigger, now there's this cult of petite, harmless females. It becomes very confusing when drawing boobs or not drawing boobs, 'cause the size of the boob in relation to the rest of the body is like an indicator of power.

NP: But is that indicative of physical power over mental power?

CRG: I don't know. I was just thinking about anytime I'm confronted with having to draw boobs or no boobs. It determines how old I'm making a character. It's always a very confusing issue because I don't want to make them too big, because that plays into this weird like Japanese manga fetishization of the boob. But then you make them too small and she's 10 or 12, and it gets into the weird pedophile grey area. So I never know what to do with the boobs when I'm drawing them.

NP: It's kind of sad that that was your biggest issue when drawing Alice.

CRG: Yeah, because it's like, should she be older? But then it's totally wrong to have her too sexy. It was distracting. Her character in the story is mentally powerful and mentally challenging. I mean, I wanted to make her interesting, but sexy is sort of a one-note thing.

NP: But then that plays into the stereotype that you can't be blonde with big boobs and have intellectually powerful arguments.

CRG: Yeah, that you can't have both. It's a conundrum right? But then she can't be ugly right? You can't have an ugly little girl, that's totally not allowed. It's funny, just drawing these things and amending them, and thinking about all these visual clues.

NP: Obviously LA and the OC has provided a massive amount of inspiration for your work, but now you live in the middle of the woods not far from Oregon. What effects have your new surroundings had on your work?

CRG: I was born and raised in LA, and I don't it's a great idea to live all your life in one place. I think it's good to scare yourself, and, if you have the means, to try out new situations. I wanted to be closer to nature. I wanted to live in nature - like really in it - and not be surrounded by convenience all the time.

The area we live in, it's really beautiful. It's within the boundaries of National Forest and National Park, so it is a preserved area. That's really inspiring because there's intact eco-systems and giant redwood trees, all these things that just seem other-worldly. In a way it makes me sad because I feel that there's not many of these places left anymore. We've destroyed a lot of them...I don't know how much longer we're going to last here in society, and I want to be able to live in this before it gets destroyed.


Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, featuring the illustrations of Camille Rose Garcia, is available from Amazon.com and all fine bookstores. An exhibition of original art from the book will be held at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles. The show opens on March 6th with a special book release party. Garcia will subsequently embark on a West Coast book signing tour. Go to CamilleRoseGarcia.com/ for further details.

(video) Missy, co-founder of SuicideGirls on G4's "Attack of the Show." We were all briefed about the controversy surrounding the removal of 5,000 "sexually explicit" applications in the App Store, including SuicideGirls very own Flip Strip app. (If you don't know about... more

Missy, co-founder of SuicideGirls on G4's "Attack of the Show."

We were all briefed about the controversy surrounding the removal of 5,000 "sexually explicit" applications in the App Store, including SuicideGirls very own Flip Strip app.

(If you don't know about this yet, check out Nicole's article here.)

In the most generic wording possible, SG was given notice of the programs removal at 10 at night, after having already deleted it from iTunes:

When asked if Missy was planning on reformulating the FlipStrip app to be approved by Apple, she wittily remarked:

How can we conquer censorship? It's clearly time to start the revolution of sexy starched collars! Who's with me!

Reality TV rarely represents anything viewers would recognize as actual reality. The Bachelor uses real people but puts them in a dating pageant that never seems to result in any actual marriages. Survivor drops them on an island where no one's life is actually at risk, and it's just a popularity... more

Reality TV rarely represents anything viewers would recognize as actual reality. The Bachelor uses real people but puts them in a dating pageant that never seems to result in any actual marriages. Survivor drops them on an island where no one's life is actually at risk, and it's just a popularity contest in the end.

The Apprentice has one thing going for it. It is a real job with Donald Trump. Trump is a character and there's the showmanship of the boardroom firings and the weekly challenges, but something about it is real. Celebrity Apprentice is more of the show version. Actors, athletes and rockers don't need a job, but they play for charity, and so viewers can see a gang of notable eccentrics compete.

Bret Michaels joins the third celebrity version of The Apprentice. Reality TV has brought Michaels a career renaissance. Rock of Love was just another dating show but it put Michaels' rock n' roll lifestyle on TV for a new generation to see. Adding to that, video games let kids jam to Poison tracks on their fake guitars. Michaels still records solo, and with artists like Miley Cyrus. Between reality shows, he tours playing international gigs.

Scheduling an interview with a rock star requires the participation of a whole entourage. First an assistant calls to make sure the reporter is there. Then a publicist calls to make sure the reporter is briefed on all of Michaels' projects. When Michaels himself calls, he is on, projecting an engaging performance even through a phone line.

SG: What is it about these reality shows that suits your personality?

BM: You know, for Apprentice, that's a pretty easy one for me. It was the fact that first of all, I'm a lifelong juvenile diabetic. The fact that I'm a lifelong diabetic is probably a big reason for it. I've watched the first two seasons and I love that challenge. I think that also, after coming out of Rock of Love and doing three seasons of Rock of Love, it was nice to show that there's another side besides just sucking face with girls and drinking beer. [Laughs] I've got some other talents. I'm not sure what they are but I was anxious to show that for me, luck doesn't fall in my lap. It's always been the harder I work, the luckier I got.

SG: When you're into the business world of The Apprentice does it draw out different aspects of your personality?

BM: I think for sure. One of the things that happens, when we're in there, all of us, especially this year, when I say I think it was the best cast they've had, here's why. Everyone came in there wanting to win. You know how sometimes you watch shows and you know immediately who's going to be the first one to get killed off? You kind of look and you're like, 'Oh, that one's going.' This one, everyone came firing. The first day, when you see this whole Apprentice open up, I flew in because the night before, I played a concert in Leone, Mexico at the arena that night before, and landed that morning. I'll just put it this way, let's just say the timing wasn't the best. I'll just leave it at that. I can't give you too much. So I had to quickly get into gear but everyone there was a competitor and it really brought out that really competitive spirit that I have in there. There's two really extreme sides to me. There's a side of me that really loves to play. I love to party, I love to rock and there's a side of me that really works hard too.

SG: Is it hard to invest in the competition like it's the real Apprentice? I know you want to do well for charity, but you don't need a job with Trump.

BM: I can't speak for anybody else but I can tell you this much. I lived in the moment. I took every task that he threw at us, and I just took those tasks and I worked really hard and did the best I could do. I didn't go, 'Oh, this is TV.' I think after doing Rock of Love for three years, and before that I had done Nashville Star, the funny side of me says my acting skills are limited which is why I lean towards reality. The other side of me says there's this part of me, I do really well in the real world. When the real me comes out and you're not forcing me to be something I'm not, I've been my own boss since I was literally 17 years old, for better or worse. I think this show really helped to bring out that side of me, that competitive side but also the street smarts.

SG: You must have a certain business savvy to survive the music industry, right?

BM: You know it and let me tell you. People always talk about the entertainment business in broad strokes. Let me tell you something. I've been in the movie side of it, I've been in the reality TV side. The music side is the most savage side, hands down. You've got good people and straight up evil people and they all seem to be able to get through the cracks on the music side because they run into musicians like myself. They're young, they want to make it and they don't always know exactly what they're reading or the contracts they're signing. I was just lucky that I was street savvy to read through that stuff and not sign away the publishing and all that kind of crazy stuff.

SG: Do you wear a suit to the boardroom?

BM: Let me put it this way. I'm pretty Bret Michaels in it. It would be a Bret Michaels suit. I don't know exactly what that means, but let's put it this way, it wasn't a typical business suit, no. It wasn't your typical suit although I will tell you this, I learned a few things, I can say this about Apprentice. When I went in there, I learned three things. My computer skills got much better. I'll just tell you that much. I learned how to text for the first time in my life. Everyone laughs because I'm the guy that would still have a pager if I wasn't kicked into the future. Then the best thing of all of it was that it really honestly, there is no slacking because they work you hard. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I literally went in there thinking this'll be kind of fun. You do some work, blah blah blah. When I got in there, I had no idea what I had walked into, like the hours that they push you. I'll tell you what, it can break you.

SG: It does sound different from Rock of Love.

BM: Yes, which is different hours.

SG: What do you think shows like Rock of Love have done for real world relationships, with their examples of outrageous behavior?

BM: I say this carefully, but when I went in to do the show, I just went in to have fun. I had become newly single. The first time it came up, I turned it down and I just said I wasn't ready for that. The second time, I thought, 'You know what? I'm going to go in and make this a party. I'm going to make it fun. I'm not going to allow them to tell me who I like or don't like.' I think it set [a tone of] fun for this reason. You look at all the stuff that's going on now. I did the lingerie mud football thing. Honestly, I made the show a party. I took the girls out, we raced motocross, we went camping, we did stuff. I think that in a relationship, this is the truth, I think a lot more of it would work if people had a lot more fun and mixed in the responsibility with it. In other words, what happens is one day a relationship becomes just responsibility and all of a sudden you forgot why you liked or loved that person in the first place. That's the truth. You have to still be excited to see them and have fun in a relationship and I think that also brings out, like on Rock of Love Bus, I think it really brought out the character of what people are. In other words, I always call it the three month period of dating. It's sort of an incubation period. You go in and everyone says bullsh*t stuff like they like to hike and take long walks, you know what I mean? All of a sudden, put them into a situation where they actually go camping and see how they react. Put them in situations and watch how people react. That's when you're going to see the real person come out. For me, it made it a lot of fun and it was a good time doing it.

SG: That is a really good message. Do you think that's what viewers got out of seeing the show?

BM: Remember it's a lot of editing. We didn't get in on the editing. It sometimes appears like it was cat fighting and 24/7 drunken debauchery. There were a couple good hours in there when we were sober and eating by the table and cooking and talking about life. In that time, you get the best of both worlds. When they would always ask me advice on these relationship shows, I said, 'Here's the bottom line. If you love somebody, you love them. You're having a great time with them and the responsibility comes and you want to be responsible.' What happens is sometimes you meet somebody and then you sort of suck out of them everything you liked them for. Then that's when people move on to other relationships. If you can still have fun with somebody and look at them as your peer, that's what makes it great.

SG: I just see even The Bachelor never ends up in marriage or long lasting relationship.

BM: No, but for me, I think what worked on my show is I was straightforward. You watch the beginning of every year. I said this to the girls right up front, 'Let's make it a party, let's have fun, let's date. If something comes from it, great. If it doesn't, I got to meet some really cool people.' You'll never see me on a show where the first day I walk out and I go, 'I love all of you and want it all to work.' Even the first season of Rock of Love, the very first one years ago, they would ask me, 'What are you going to do if one of the girls isn't into you?' I said, 'Let 'em tell me.' They said, 'Well, that's going to be embarrassing on TV.' Lo and behold, the first night I walked up to the one girl, Lauren, and she's like, 'Yeah, I'm not really that into you.' And I go, 'Oh, is there anything I can do?' She goes, 'Yeah, I'm just not that into you.' I'm like, 'Okay.' But that's real life and I think people caught on my show the reality that was going on, rather than everyone was scripted and told what to do. We just sort of cut loose and let it happen.

SG: So how's your love life now?

BM: I think my love life is great. Again, I've got two beautiful daughters and I think that anyone that steps into me in a relationship has to understand straight up that there is no doubt I also love playing music. I said this before 1000 times, I'll say it again. Rock n' roll has been the reason for and the ruin of all my relationships. In other words, it's exciting at first, the traveling and doing stuff, but the fact that I love it is almost like I've already got my daughters I love, I've got a music career that I love. I think that's one of the things of trying to find that balance. At first it's exciting because you're traveling, you're doing stuff, you're going from city to city. Then to some people it just gets old or tiresome.

SG: Good transition to music. Miley Cyrus might seem like an odd pairing. What sort of groove do you find together?

BM: Here's exactly what happened. Miley's first concert was seeing Poison in Nashville, TN at the Starwood Arena. That was her first concert ever and I remember her doing a couple interviews and reading that. Then I met the whole family. I knew Billy Ray and I knew Tish and they came out to a couple shows in L.A. Then Miley when we were in New York, it was great because they wanted to recut "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." She said, 'It's one of my all time favorite songs.' She just is one of the people I said that will make the jump. That's my feeling. She'll make that transition from a young pop star into having a long career, I'm going to say, as a rock star or as a musician. I really feel that, because she can sit down at the piano and play. We sat down with the guitars and started playing music and just had a real natural chemistry. The next thing you know, she went in and she sang some of the stuff. We bumped the key up because she sings, obviously, very high. So I bumped the key up from a G to a B. We just went from there and it was really a good experience in New York. We're finishing it in L.A. now.

SG: What about collaborating on an original song with her?

BM: Yeah, I have a new solo album called Custom Built and I have a song on there called 'Nothing to Lose.' When we were just sitting around in the studio hanging out, I played her a couple of the tracks and like, 'Holy crap, that's a really, really good song.' She fell in love with the lyrics and said she wanted to try something a little different. One of her idols is Stevie Nicks. I said, 'Well, I worked with Stevie and wrote songs for her and produced some of her stuff. She's very freestyle. Why don't you go in and just kind of listen to the song and sing some stuff around it?' She just really, really nailed it. It was sort of a freestyle unproduced session and we got out of it exactly what we wanted to.

SG: Have you found another new generation has discovered your music through Guitar Hero?

BM: The one thing I can say was Guitar Hero and Rock of Love just brought not only the solo music but that Poison music. We've been fortunate because Poison had already done one generation skip where you make it long enough to get to the next generation. Now all of a sudden with Rock of Love and Guitar Hero, not only solo but Poison, it's brought that music out and they get to hear it. It seems like there's a big resurgence of music from the '70s and '80s, that sort of '70s and '80s rock groove that's sort of coming back anyway which is nice.

SG: Was "Talk Dirty to Me" just an innocent love song?

BM: In some ways it's a really dirty innocent love song. Pretty direct though. You don't really beat around the bush. It kind of cuts right to the chase.

SG: Thinking about "Every Rose," were you doing sensitive metal back then?

BM: No, I would not say I thought of it as sensitive metal but I think 'Every Rose' really broke the door wide open because a lot of stuff back then, when I say pop power ballad, it was the first one of that genre that brought out the acoustic guitar and kind of broke it wide open again where you can start out with the acoustic. I was going through a situation where a girl broke my heart, an exotic dancer of all things. It was one of those moments where I just wrote the song and Capital Records really didn't like the song. They thought it was a career killer. It ended up becoming a number one song in pop rock and country which was nice.

SG: Isn't that the case with all the classics, that the ones the bosses don't want become the biggest hits?

BM: It's the weirdest thing because when I say this truthfully, I'll never forget walking into Capital. Even though we have our own label through Capital, right? We went in there and I said, 'We want to shoot this video.' I said 'Every Rose' and they fought me. It was an ugly argument in that conference room. They're like, 'This song sounds kind of Americana, it sounds kind of country.' I said, 'Look, we had 'I Won't Forget You' on the first record and it did really well.'' They're like, 'Yeah, but that wasn't like this.' I just really fought them on it and we finally went, we were at Brown County Arena in Green Bay and we just brought out the video cameras and shot the video pretty much ourselves. It was that simple. Let's just shoot live footage and open up this beginning and that was it.

SG: Are you working on more solo music or more collaborations?

BM: I write a lot with a lot of other top notch writers like Jeffrey Steele and people like that, but what I've been doing is mostly just focusing on just solo music. I hope one day Poison will make another record, another new studio album but right now it just is highly unlikely. I'm one of those guys, in my house if you were here you'd see I've got this beautiful studio. I go in there all the time and I still am excited and passionate about making music.

SG: Are you putting together a new album or touring with the current one?

BM: Here's everything that's going on. The new album is simply called Custom Built. It's a new solo record. Then the tour kicks off. Right now all the way through the end of the year, all the dates are coming in but it starts right now in Hidalgo, TX. It's called where it's a combination of the U.S. and Mexico and it's a great festival. Tim McGraw is playing on Saturday and I believe I'm playing Sunday. This is all solo this year. There's no Poison. It's all solo and I'm really excited. It kicks off and then we're out for the whole year in Canada, we go to Australia, Mexico and then we go to Japan, Europe, all that.

SG: What are we going to see in your upcoming book?

BM: Simon and Schuster's putting out a book that's their biggest preordered book so far to date and it's called Roses and Thorns: The Reality of my Rock n' Roll Fantasy. It will bring you to your knees not only laughing but crying. I'm not kidding you. Somewhere between what I'll call my comedy of errors that is my life and then fighting to get through it, the real reality behind the curtain of what goes on of trying to succeed.

SG: Was there a point in your life where you became comfortable sharing your personal trials?

BM: Here's the thing. The book is the hardest thing I've ever [done]. Honestly, if you were to call Lauren right now, the editor at Simon and Schuster, it's been the most difficult thing I've ever done. I told her straight up a couple times, 'Let's just not do it' because there's moments where I just don't feel like I want to throw anybody under the bus, but I also have to be able to tell you the story. It's exciting. I want you to read the raw reality, but in order to do it, I also don't want to hurt someone else's life that has nothing to do with the book. It's a Catch-22 so I think what I'm able to do is grab pictures. I want to be able to prove what I'm saying. So you have pictures and then the story that goes with them. It's really an interesting read.

SG: Do you get to discuss how you've handled having diabetes on the road and on tour?

BM: It's really difficult. I've had it for 40 years. I got it when I was six years old and there are times when it's a battle, but I find a way. I do four injections a day so I get up early in the morning. Regardless of when I go to sleep, sometimes I go to sleep at three or four in the morning but I'm back up at eight or nine. I get up, I do my workout and then I go back to bed if I have to. It's tough. When you're on the road, there are times that it definitely gets rough to handle but you've just got to find a way to do it.

SG: And we've seen from your shows, you don't do without, so you still enjoy the perks of the job.

BM: Well, you've got to enjoy what you're doing. I went back to the very beginning of our conversation. In the very end of it, what's it all worth if at the end of everything you've achieved or done, at some point along the way you didn't enjoy yourself. That's the whole premise is finding that balance.

SG: After the book, the shows and the music, will we know who the real Bret Michaels is?

BM: It may be a combination of all of the above. It's like at times, you look at all that and you go how do you categorize something? I'm not sure there's exactly one category. I think that's what has made my journey unique is there's different facets and different sides that I haven't quite put my finger on, let alone other people looking at it but I think they'll have a good understanding that deep down, I would like to believe I'm a good soul. I treat people right, I treat 'em with respect and I'm having a lot of fun doing it.

SG: We'll root for you on The Apprentice.

BM: Thanks for doing this and The Apprentice was awesome. It was a good learning experience and I didn't get to say this, but I just wanted to say this about Donald Trump. Besides the fact you watch him, you have respect for him, the one thing about Trump that I think is amazing, I think in his life he's been both the predator and the prey and he is able to be nice to people, but when he gets stuff done, man, he gets it done. It was interesting to watch how he delegates. It was a good learning experience for me. He has a great presence but he also is concise when he talks with names, with people. He was very 'on.' It was interesting just to watch him work and you realize why there's a reason people are successful at what they do.

SG: Obviously we can't give away who gets fired, but if you're in the boardroom, imagine What must it be like to hear those words?

BM: Let me tell you something, I'm just going to make it funny. If you want to catch me on The Apprentice show, don't miss the first few episodes. You might want to tune in early. I'll just leave it at that. No one wants to be fired or hear that. That's all I'm saying, but I came out trying. How's that sound?

The Celebrity Apprentice premieres March 14 on NBC.

At a time when, however deliberately or consciously, we live our lives in public online, access to our privacy is the new currency of value. Just because you can keep track of your friends via Facebook, post and tag photos on MySpace, and spew out your every waking thought on Twitter - all easily and... more

At a time when, however deliberately or consciously, we live our lives in public online, access to our privacy is the new currency of value. Just because you can keep track of your friends via Facebook, post and tag photos on MySpace, and spew out your every waking thought on Twitter - all easily and for free - it's easy to assume it's a good thing. Josh Harris is a man who made a similar assumption.

Described as "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of," Harris carved a high profile career out of being an instinctive World Wide Web visionary. Before the web was very worldly or wide, he founded Jupiter Research, a company which sold technology trend and impact information to corporations that barely understood what a website was. Harris then rolled the dot.com fortune he made there into Pseudo.com, a New York based Internet TV station that went live when most of America was still on dial up.

Serving as both business manager and creative director at Pseudo, which webcast multiple channels of original content, Harris reinvented himself in the frame of a digital performance artist during his tenure at the too-far-ahead of its time company. As the millennium loomed, Harris was forced out of Pseudo, and he subsequently invested a large amount of his considerable fortune ($80 million at its peak) in a series of two very controversial digital media social experiments.

The first was called Quiet, though it was anything but. For the project which was intended to mark the turn of the millennium, Harris built an ambitious - and expensive - fully wired environment, which housed 100 guests / experiment subjects 24/7 for a period of 30 days. The claustrophobic underground bunker featured pod bunks for sleeping, communal toilet and bathing facilities, a dining area, and a poorly insulated gun range where residents could blow off steam. There was also an onsite interrogation room.

Potential residents had to sell their pixilated souls in order to gain entry to Quiet. There was an intense intake program that involved an intrusive questionnaire, those that passed this initial test had to agree to subject themselves to random interrogations, among other dehumanizing things. All activity in the bunker was caught on camera and microphone, and relayed for the entertainment of Quiet's residents to their in-Pod TVs. Privacy was non-existent, and individuals were reduced to being "channels" for the entertainment of others - suffice to say the sate-or-the art society Harris had created was far from utopian.

For his next experiment / performance art piece Josh took things a step further, and took on the roles of both puppet and puppet master. He installed 30 motion-controlled surveillance cameras and 66 high sensitivity microphones in a New York loft, and moved in with his new girlfriend, Tanya Corrin (who had previously worked with Harris as a presenter at Pseudo). The pair were the first couple to broadcast their everyday home lives live on the Internet, and viewers could post their comments in real time via the project's associated chat rooms. The stunt garnered much mainstream attention, and fed Harris' growing need for 15 minutes of fame - per day. But as life in public unfolded, and not in the way either of them had planned, Harris and Corrin realized a little too late that perhaps the most valuable thing online might be privacy. It's a lesson we all may want to take note of.

To this end, renowned film director Ondi Timoner set about assembling and editing footage she'd shot of Harris over a 10-year period. The resulting film, We Live In Public, which Timoner describes as "a cautionary tale," is both thought provoking and shocking, having a profound effect on all who open themselves up to it. The documentary won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2009, making Timoner, whose previous film Dig! was also a winner at the festival (in 2004), the only director ever to be given the honor twice.

SuicideGirls caught up with Timoner ahead of We Live In Public's March 1st DVD and VOD release. Here she gives us an exclusive retrospective tour of the Quiet bunker, and an insight into the mind of its maniacal master.

Nicole Powers: How did you first bump into Josh?

Ondi Timoner: I actually worked on Tanya, Josh's girlfriend's [Psuedo.com] show Cherry Bomb. I would shoot and edit for it. I picked up some really good cash and I was really blown away by this place. I'd never heard of anything called an Internet television network -- I mean for god's sake there wasn't even broadband, you know? I met Josh there and went to some Pseudo parties and so forth, but he doesn't really remember me from that.

NP: How did that lead to your involvement in documenting the Quiet project?

OT: When 1999 rolls around, I'm back in Los Angeles, and he called me. I picked up the phone and he says, "Hi Ondi! This is Josh Harris. I'm wondering if you're interested in documenting cultural history."

I happened to be in New York shooting a pilot for a series I was creating on music's effect of people's lives called Sound Affects for VH1. I went down [to Quiet's headquarters] in early December and they were moving scaffolding into the building right there on Broadway between Franklin and Leonard, a matter of blocks from the courthouse right near the World Trade Center.

I said, "What are you moving this metal in for?" And they said, "To build the pods." I saw another guy hanging surveillance cameras, and I said, "What are you doing?" And he said, "I'm hanging 110 surveillance cameras through the space." I thought, "I still don't know what's going on but I'm in. Somebody's got to film this thing whatever it's going to be."

NP: At any point did Josh elucidate any further about what the project was supposed to be about?

OT: I think that his intention was to push everybody's boundaries to the limit to see what they would do. I don't know that he necessarily was trying to test what would happen when the Internet had broadband. I sort of attributed that vision to him in the film. I think it was more his haphazard genius, just seeing what would happen, and seeing just how much people would give up for their opportunity of fame.

NP: When you were filming Quiet, were you actually living there?

OT: I had a pod, and I was there 20 hours of the day. Josh thought it was important for me to have a hotel room, to not lose perspective entirely. I'm not the type who would ever have checked in to the bunker in the first place. By that I mean I'm not one hundred percent a no boundaries exhibitionist. I would leave and come [back]. I was one of the few people that could do that. I always had someone there - always. There was never not a documentary camera on site, but I pretty much spent most of my waking hours there.

NP: Were you there every day for the full 30 days?

OT: Yes. Absolutely. It got to me too. It was not a pleasant place to be. I know that I have a positive moment in the film where I'm standing at the cereal bar and I'm talking about how I've been reborn, but that was very much about the cereal bar.

NP: What kind of people did subject themselves to this? Was there a common thread?

OT: Josh says it's fame, but I think it's actually our desire not to feel alone. That is important to everybody. I think that fame has been held up as this cure all. Like, if I can be famous then according to what I've seen I'll be happy. I'll be surrounded always and not alone.

In terms of the bunker, it was the "having your lives matter" moment, not being alone, not being somewhere where it wasn't the center of the universe on the millennium.

I'll answer 500 hundred questions, I'll get fingerprinted, I'll put on the uniform, I'll shower in public, I'll shit in public and do whatever else you say just to be [a part of] that in New York City. Then, whatever boundaries one may have had personally fell away under the pressure of everyone else doing it. Boundaries slipped away much like they do on the Internet. You may think that it's weird posting this private picture, and the next thing you know, a year later, you're posting all your pictures, you know?

NP: At the beginning it was all fun and games, and then life in the bunker devolved Lord of the Flies style. Was there any one incident that prompted that change?

OT: No. People just got overwhelmed. It wasn't like it got worse and worse, or that more people were pulled in for interrogations, it was just people piled on top of each other. And the noise! It was called "Quiet: We Live In Public" but it was anything but that. The noise, and light, and everybody piled on top of each other, and everybody in each other's business.

NP: I would imagine the sleep deprivation alone would send people crazy.

OT: Yeah, the sleep deprivation was freaking people out - that's true too.

NP: The buttons Joshua pushed with people, in the interrogations, it did seem that he wanted to get to the point where people would lose control.

OT: Yeah, I think he did. I think he wanted to push them to the absolute limit. He had been consulting with a CIA psychiatrist saying, "What can we do to break them."

NP: What were the worst interrogation incidents that you witnessed?

OT: I think that the girl, Elisa, who's interrogated to the point of having to go through a suicide attempt. It was actually pretty startling, very troubling in terms of the ethics behind that. She was losing it.

NP: That's where the CIA guy asks her to demonstrate the speed of the knife as it went through her flesh during her suicide attempt.

OT: Yeah, that's a little bit crazy. So is the African American dude, Chouaibou, who is interrogated about his Communist party and drug past. I mean there's stuff there could get somebody in trouble, where it's no longer really fun and games. They could hurt themselves or be arrested. You never know where that stuff's going to end up. I think at that point it's questionable how much mental control people have.

But that said, people are choosing to be there, so I understand Josh's perspective as well. So I'm not judging the ethics behind it necessarily. I don't think Josh Harris would have really cared terribly much if anything really bad happened to anybody because that's the thing that makes Josh a walking cautionary tale. Everything's a game to him, and everybody is a player in his game. He doesn't feel like it's his responsibility to look out for them.

NP: Did you question his ethics at the time? Or did you feel your job as a documentarian was just to observe and allow events to unfold?

OT: That's how I do it. I'm not a total fly on the wall because I don't think it's the best way to do it. Interloper Films is my company; I think that "interloper" means you're observing, but you're also in the group, you're in the group but taking notes...So, no, I'm not one to meddle and really push things to go where they wouldn't naturally go, but I also won't stand there when someone falls on the floor. I'll film them falling on the floor, and then I'll put the camera down and help them up. That's just how I roll.

But I've got to say with Josh, I think one of the most important moments in We Live In Public is the desensitization, the observation of how desensitized everybody became regarding what was going on there. Like that shower scene; everybody was just kind of sitting around - even I, filming it. I didn't know what was really going on, whether it was rape or not. I know the guy who was in the shower and I really don't think that that's where he is as a human - he's a very gentle human being actually - but there was just a fevered pitch to the whole thing, with the spectator sport of it.

The woman in the shower, I feel like she felt the pressure of all the eyes on her and things kind of spiraled a bit. Josh, when he says to the camera, "It's 6 in the morning and there's two people having sex in the shower and we're all sitting here watching and it's kind of like [makes a noise indicating nothing]" - that's a very important line in the film I think because that's what's going on. Things that used to be exciting and have some kind of glamour to them, or be taboo, or be shocking, or be off-limits, or violent, or whatever, they don't have the same impact anymore because there's so many images out there. We're all desensitized. I think that's an important metaphor that the bunker makes for life today online.

NP: I guess that's what people deal with when they have porn addiction issues. Because pictures and video of naked people fucking is so readily available that one can get to the point where such images no longer have any power - or the desired effect. If people subject themselves to hours of porn a day, it can cease to do the trick. Then they have to find something else that works for them - the next high.

OT: Yeah, what's the next high? It can get really crazy. But then again, we can talk about this and it's interesting to be aware of, but at the end of the day, like Josh says, what's the point of judging it? There really is no way out. It's not like we're going back. It's an evolutionary process. You just have to figure out whether or not you're going to watch the sex that's online. You've got to determine whether you're going to post that photo. You've got to determine whether you're going to be on your virtual box as you're walking down the street. That's your choice. And that's fine.

Half the time I'm walking down the street I'm typing into my Blackberry, and I probably have a very, very arguable reason to do that. But I am missing something. I'm not going to deny it...I'm somewhat sacrificing an interaction with the world around me to be inside my virtual box.

NP: Yeah. I have a couple of friends that when you're with them will spend more time staring into their Blackberry than interacting with you. They don't mean to be rude or anything, but they've lost their ability to be fully in the now with the people they're with. And I don't want to be that person, so I've actually made a deliberate choice not to have a Blackberry.

OT: Wow! Pretty impressive dude. I don't know that I wouldn't be able to function without it at this point, and I hate that. That's what I love about the movie though, that you're looking at a bunker that's 10 years ago now - exactly. You can't believe how far we've come, how much that vision has come true in terms of the Internet and our mainlining addiction to it. It only begs the question, where are we going to be in 5 years?

NP: One of the thoughts that came to me as I watched the film is how our perception of history has sped up. I mean, in the movie, the people you interview in the present that are talking about the past, they're talking about 1990 as if it were 1890. The speed of progress has really changed our perception of history. Same with the speed of social evolution. You look at the way kids interact with technology compared to the way people of our generation do, and it's very different. You talk about how you saw barriers being broken down during the Quiet experiment, but kids who have grown up with social media don't have those barriers in the first place.

OT: Yeah, the kids today, the ones that were born after the Internet existed already, those guys, they have never experienced a life offline...For them there is no definition of public and private.

NP: Going back to the film, right after the Quiet project ended, you actually cut together what you call the Bunker Cut of the movie right?

OT: Yes. We're actually going to do a new Bunker Cut for the Collector's Edition DVD. In 2000 Josh asked me if I would come to New York and do a cut of the bunker. He put me up right in the heart of Manhattan so I could breathe the same energy that I had when I was filming the bunker. I shipped all my stuff over there and moved over there. I arrived and he said change of plans, I'm sending you to an apple farm.

But anyway, I convinced him to move back to Manhattan towards the end of the cut, to finish it up, work with a music supervisor, etc. So in January I moved to a loft in Manhattan. I flew out to Sundance to raise money for Dig!, and I had given Josh a rough cut in the meanwhile. I get back a week later and I open the door to my loft and it looks really, really spacious, and I realize that Josh has absconded with all of the masters and the Avid. So I call him and I say, "Josh what's going on?" And he says, "I didn't like the way I looked." I said, "That's what a rough cut's for. We talk about that and make whatever adjustments." And he said, "No. Change of plan, it's off right now. It's just not the right time."

I knew that he was living in public with Tanya but I thought things were going well. Little did I realize, she had just left him and he was at the absolute nadir of his self-image, his mental state as you can see in the movie. He was down and out and ready to flee Manhattan, and running out of money fast. He stiffed me like twenty grand, and he left Manhattan, and I left. I went off to Africa to make a movie about a dam and was grateful to feel the dirt under my fingernails, and work on real people issues, real problems, like a dam threatening the oldest civilization in Sub-Saharan Africa. You can't get more of a contrast than that from the bunker, which was like a cyber narcissistic gun range.

I just forgot about Josh, and put as much distance [between us]. I went back to LA and finished Dig!. It took years to edit, and a few years later, in 2004 Dig! won Sundance. I got an email from Josh: "Any interest in finishing the film?" I said, "No," because I thought he was a charlatan, and less relevant than ever. He wrote me back and said, "I'll give you fifty percent ownership of the film, full creative control, and send you all the masters right away." So that's how the film was returned to me.

But I still didn't finish it. I went off and made my movie Join Us. I just didn't know how the story of Josh Harris applied still - until Facebook status updates. In 2007 I saw the first status update. It was: "I'm driving west on the freeway." I couldn't believe that someone was putting something that mundane up as a public posting. Then everybody was doing it, and suddenly I realized that the bunker was coming true for all of us. That's when I raced to finish the film. We had to go through about 5,000 hours of footage in about 8 months to get it done in time to premiere at Sundance. Since then it has been so gratifying to see just how relevant the film is to people's lives.

NP: Backing up, following the bunker experiment, the next chapter in Josh's life was him living on camera, live on the Internet with his girlfriend Tanya.

OT: To me that's a really important part of the film.

NP: That's where he gets his comeuppance. I mean there were no real consequences for Josh during the Quiet period.

OT: Exactly. He climbs into the TV set and he becomes the rat in his own experiment at this point, and the results don't turn out very well for him. He really takes the only relationship that he's ever had that was close and intimate and beaches it on 30 motion-controlled surveillance cameras and 66 invasive microphones. I mean his girlfriend who signed on to it thinking it would be fun and cool, and that they were living a fast and crazy Internet life, she ended up leaving him. She just couldn't be intimate in public. And I think that's an important lesson; the Internet, as wonderful as it is, is not an intimate medium. It's just not. If you want to keep something intimate and if you want to keep something sacred, you probably shouldn't post it.

Also the dot.com stock market crash happens during that time. Josh loses all his money while living in public. His contemporaries got to figure out what they were going to do next privately, whereas Josh is living right there on camera, losing his girlfriend, losing his money, losing basically his pride and his identity. He really had ruled Manhattan and suddenly he was kind of the laughing stock. Not to mention that fact that there was this bunch of chatter saying, "Look at this boring guy! Who does he think he is?"

NP: It was interesting to see what happened within Tanya's relationship. They stopped arguing to resolve issues, and were motivated instead by winning in the eyes of those who were observing them, who would immediately post their thoughts in the chat rooms.

OT: Exactly. It becomes about the votes of the audience, it's more of a political race. It's not about resolving the issues between them and that's really I guess ultimately what destroys the relationship.

NP: You see so much of that behavior in our reality TV stars today. They're not interested in resolving any of their issues, they're just interested in having them as means of gaining attention, and to get more people on their side. They'll play up their victimhood rather than their skills as problem solvers.

OT: Well reality TV is a whole 'nother topic, but it's not, it's related to this too. I mean the bunker doesn't just pre-figure the Internet, it really does pre-figure reality TV as well, and the way that people react and act, and it's not a pretty sight.

There are lots of really super positive results from social networking. You probably find on SuicideGirls that people of similar interests can find each other, and niche groups can self-organize, and revolutions can happen this way. This is a wonderful thing in so, so many ways. I've been discovered or contacted by people through Facebook that have become a very valuable part of not only my team at Interloper, but really dear friends. So there are all sorts of great, great, great things to come from it.

NP: Right, there's immense potential to do good, one only has to look at what happened on Twitter with Haiti. But what Josh chose to do with the technology and money at his disposal was not exactly good. Rather than choosing to create a digital utopia, he chose to create a totalitarian, militarized dystopian society.

OT: Yes. Josh Harris, he's not trying to do anything good. I like the guy but he's sort of like the Darth Vader. I joke that I'm the Luke Skywalker in regards to this film. I wanted to make the film to fire a warning shot, just to let people know to think a little deeper right at this crucial moment. We're at this tipping point where the virtual world is taking over. He would rather figure out a way that he can sell you your life back and exploit you. That's why he makes a very compelling subject, and also why the film wasn't maybe nominated for an Oscar. People hate him. Some people absolutely loathe and detest the guy. But I think he makes an incredible subject because of that.

NP: I guess it was brave that he gave you complete creative control at the point where he'd lost everything. I mean he was never going to come out smelling like roses in this movie.

OT: It certainly took a lot of guts, and to be honest with you, and to be realistic, it wouldn't have happened if he hadn't reached a point of desperation. He just wanted to make sure all the work that he had done, and all the money he'd spent to create these incredible experiences, the experiment and everything, actually came to something.

NP: So it goes back to that fundamental need we all have to matter.

OT: Yeah. He did all this and really blew his fortune on it - and his mind. If it wasn't going to come to something then that was it. I became his only hope, or his greatest hope. He even said that in Ethiopia in 2008. The cameraman said to him, "What's your plan to get out of Ethiopia?" And he just pointed at me.

NP: You filmed the afterward of the movie in Ethiopia where Josh retreated after he sold his only remaining liquid asset, his apple farm. He seemed to have very similar instincts to you when after the bunker you went off to Africa to film people with real problems and to smell the dirt under your feet.

OT: I think it was more to escape American Express. I think his reasons were: get out of Dodge, escape Amex, reinvent himself. He told Tanya something that I think is probably important, he said something to her like, "You should leave the public eye sometimes. Don't be afraid to leave the public eye because you can always come back, and come back different."

And I think he knew that his dollar would go a lot further there and that he didn't have many left. He had lived in Ethiopia when he was a child for a year with his father, his whole family. His father was in the CIA and had been based there for a year, and apparently it was the happiest year of Josh's life.

NP: Interesting, because your movie explores Josh's relationship with his mother, whom he overtly blames for much of his emotional baggage in the film, but I guess the whole cold war, CIA psychology that he implemented in the bunker came from his dad.

OT: Yeah. I think that's probably what it is. That's why he did the CIA thing, and I think that's [the reason for] his obsession with guns too. His dad used to carry a bunch of guns on him.

NP: Because there was no real reason to have a shooting range in the bunker. That seemed one of the most peculiar and bizarre things. A room for video games maybe - but a room for guns? This was supposed to be an experiment in the future and guns are part of our past.

OT: Exactly.

NP: So you rushed to get the documentary ready for Sundance. What were your expectations and what was the reaction there?

OT: I knew that we had sort of a silver bullet on our hands. I submitted the film to Sundance on Halloween of 2008, and heard within a week. I was pretty aware that they were super excited about putting it in competition, which meant it was going to be spotlighted as one of the top sixteen films of the festival...I knew that were we striking a chord and that this movie was really right on time or just ahead of it. And that's how it was. We were just swept away. We didn't have many interviews lined up going to Sundance, and by day three I was losing my voice.

But it was a depressed year in the economy, and Obama was being inaugurated literally the morning after our premiere, which was cool, but it meant that a lot of execs weren't there and no sales happened for docs at Sundance that year. So we were kind of holding the bag afterwards...We put it out ourselves in 15 theaters across the America, and different cities across the world.

Now for the DVD/VOD launch we're doing six simultaneous screenings in six different cities. Eliza Dushku [Dollhouse] is going to host in LA and Adrian Grenier [Entourage] is going to host in New York, and we're going to link the six cities together into a national conversation about living in public. During the movie Josh Harris and I are going to host a show of clips from the film and extras, and I'm going to banter with him lying on a bed in Chicago. I highly recommend watching that because I'm going to ask Josh some hard questions.

Then at 7.30 PST all the screenings will stop and all the cities will link together, and Josh and I will do a Q&A based on Twitter questions. All the venue information is going to be on WeLiveInPublicTheMovie.com or you can follow me, @OndiTimoner, on Twitter. I'll be tweeting my ass off in the next week and a half. I keep my private life pretty private but needless to say I'm not going to be retreating into obscurity this week.

NP: And it's no coincidence that Eliza Dushku is hosting the LA event, because you're actually working on your next project with her aren't you?

OT: Yeah, we're doing the story of Robert Mapplethorpe. Patti Smith just came out with a book called Just kids about her relationship with Mapplethorpe. It was a very interesting dynamic that they had in their youth. He was a very vital artist and a cultural lightening rod that really pushed the limits.

I think that's actually very appropriate to talk about on the SuicideGirls site because the Suicide Girls push the limits of how women are perceived and what pinup art is, and what is sexy, and have effectively redefined it. Mapplethorpe obviously did that in a really "push it into the fine art world" [way]. Everything from S&M photography to some really edgy stuff that he found beautiful, he made beautiful side by side with flowers...There's I think a lot of people that wouldn't do what they're doing if it wasn't for Mapplethorpe. There were laws changed and court cases and all that kind of stuff as a result of the stir around Mapplethorpe. It's pretty interesting stuff, and that will be my first narrative film, which is pretty exciting.

NP: That's a departure for you.

OT: From documentaries, well not a complete departure because if you look at all my films they unfold over time. They're all narrative films. They're all suspense filled, that's what I like to do. That's why I started doing documentaries the way I started doing them. Nobody was really doing that at the time. I guess Hoop Dreams was just going to come out and that film followed a story over time, but essentially that was the only one. But otherwise, the films were all retrospective, like eating spinach or eating history books, too educational to be entertaining. That's why people weren't watching docs and that's why I got into documentary.

That's why I filmed Dig! over many years, and that why I filmed Join Us over years, and that's why We Live In Public I sat on because the biggest reason people go to the movies is to be entertained. If you're going to get people to really think about things, get them to feel them, you know? And the way you get them to feel them is to get them to lose themselves, to really feel what it is that they're watching. That's what I set out to do. So for me it's not really that much of a departure to do a scripted film. I was a theater studies major at Yale and worked with actors. It's just the next step in my own evolution as an artist.



To celebrate the VOD & DVD release of We Live In Public on March 1st, the documentary will be screened simultaneously in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, New York and Atlanta. Adrian Grenier (Entourage) will host the New York event, while Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse) hosts the screening at the Egyptian in Los Angeles. The webcast starts at 5:30 PM PST on WeLiveinPublicTheMovie.com, with screenings starting at 6 PM in Los Angeles, 7 PM in Denver, 8 PM in Chicago, and 9 PM in New York and Atlanta. During these screenings, Ondi and Josh will show exclusive clips and banter wildly from a wired. Chicago pod while fielding questions via Twitter live (use the #wlip tag to send questions). Post-screening, Ondi and Josh will link up with Adrian and Eliza and all the audiences nationwide in theaters and online to have a live interactive conversation about living in public. For further details go to: WeLiveinPublicTheMovie.com.

Ok normally I'm promoting HOT SG's ( Don't worry ladies I still love you) This blog I'm promoting hopefuls who I really think need to be pink Jeston - 20th Century Fox (image) BetteJean - Too Hot To Sleep (image) Vignette - Cajun Country SG needs more girls with curves (image) Creepy... more

Ok normally I'm promoting HOT SG's
( Don't worry ladies I still love you)
This blog I'm promoting hopefuls who I really think need to be pink

Jeston - 20th Century Fox


BetteJean - Too Hot To Sleep


Vignette - Cajun Country
SG needs more girls with curves


Creepy - Hazzard County


Annotine - Bask


Cygan - In my skin


Love Robots?
Agy Started a new group you must join
Robot Love


It's Belena's Birthday today
HAPPY BIRTHDAY WE LOVE YOU!


So ready for this weekend
Get my new camera
Get to shop for Belena's birthday present
Buying tons of cute nerdy shirts
New makeup
Maybe some new shoes
YAY!!

XOXOXOXO

The past isn't past for a group of Wisconsin-born 60-somethings in A Dark Matter, the new novel from horror maestro Peter Straub. An encounter with a vagrant in a corner bakery touches off the quest of the narrator – a successful writer and former 1960s kid – to reconnect with a group of friends... more

The past isn't past for a group of Wisconsin-born 60-somethings in A Dark Matter, the new novel from horror maestro Peter Straub. An encounter with a vagrant in a corner bakery touches off the quest of the narrator – a successful writer and former 1960s kid – to reconnect with a group of friends from his college days, each of them now far flung and living different lives, and get some overdue answers about their brief association with a charismatic campus guru named Spencer Mallon. What really occurred that day, long ago, when Spencer marched everyone into a field for a private ceremony? What did the narrator miss by opting out of the group (or ka-tet, perhaps) at the last minute, and why does his wife, a globe-trotting renaissance woman nicknamed “The Eel” refuse to discuss her involvement? The celebrated author of Julia, Lost Boy, Lost Girl, In the Night Room and other classics of supernatural terror recently spoke with SuicideGirls about his latest tome.

Ryan Stewart: Can you summarize how A Dark Matter relates to both The Skylark and A Special Place, which are two other new works by you that seem to be versions of the same story, or at least parts of the same story?

Peter Straub: It began with one long, rather extreme and hairy, novel. Extensive editing cut it way down, but I wanted some actual record of what I had written originally -- the novel that I had submitted. What I wished was for the Ur-novel to be published in a small limited edition that could not in any way impede the sales or progress of the finished product. To a great extent, however, it was a different book, one they -- my editor -- had not liked, and I wanted those who really cared to be able to see it. That was The Skylark. A Special Place is a seventy-five page novella cut from The Skylark when it was on its way to slimming down into the sleeker, more elegant A Dark Matter: it was very nasty, but crucial to the novel, and I wanted it to be available to the same rabid and much-loved fans. It was published in a nice little edition of one hundred and fifty. Two months after A Dark Matter appears, a trade publisher, Pegasus, will bring out a paperback of the novella, so more of the completists will have a change to get it. Also, although it is truly nasty, it is also alive and vibrant, and I like it a lot.

RS: One thing A Dark Matter touches on, and seems to draw some inspiration from, is the life and works of the sixteenth century mystic Cornelius Agrippa. Were his surviving writings an actual inspiration to you? Did you have an opportunity to read some of them?

PS: I bought and read through, at a good clip, Agrippa's four books of magic, and found what I needed in the fourth one. Its history is as recounted in A Dark Matter. His life, which was ragged, wildly uneven, and extremely risky, interests me more than his work.

RS: One of the novel's key characters is the guru, who has a persona that's quite benign. Would you say that encounters with hapless, couch-surfing occultists like Spencer Mallon were as common to the experience of a 60s kid as the novel suggests? If so, that phenomenon must have died out over the years.

PS: Two of these characters floated into my life while I was at Madison, so they could not have been very uncommon. The first was a true Mallon -- I really based the character Spencer Mallon on him. One evening, I sat for hours in a student apartment listening to this good-looking, thirty-ish guy ramble on and on about India, violence, and the occult. He had seen a man cut off another man's hand in a Tibetan bar, and he thought this was full of magical significance. The girls around me, I noticed, had fallen for the guru one and all, they bought his act completely. The second of these mages talked his way into my apartment and lived there for a month, eating and drinking at no cost to himself, until my roommate and I threw him out.

RS: My overall take on A Dark Matter is that the relationship between the volatile teenager Keith Hayward and his murderous uncle forms the book's heart. It's an exploration of how evil can be created and then introduced into the world.

PS: Yes, I wanted the book to be at least in part an examination of, an exploration into, evil, and Keith and uncle Till were meant to be evidence of the existence of evil as an autonomous force in the universe -- I wanted the reader really to see that though Hayward met a terrible death, he was no actual loss to the world. In a larger sense, though, I think evil is a matter of absence of meaning -- the translation of experience into a wire hanger, a merely gestural and empty form. That is the true “dark matter” in the book, and the subject of [the character named] Boats's odd tale.

RS: Keith almost seems to be a young Jeffrey Dahmer in the making, with his animal mutilation and so forth, and you've created Dahmer-esque figures before in your fiction -- have you ever toyed with the notion of actually doing a long-form, non-fiction exploration of Milwaukee's favorite son?

PS: I am sort of crazy about poor Dahmer, but I wrote everything I could about him in The Throat, and since then there have been too many nonfiction books about Dahmer to make another project like that interesting to anyone.

RS: I really liked the notion of your detective character having everything about the Till case figured out, but then being unexpectedly thwarted by his inability to write well enough to be published. Did that twist come from someone you knew having that problem?

PS: I'm sure such people exist, but I don't know any of them. However, I do know a number of writers who could do a great deal more if only they could write a little better, a little more passionately, more interestingly.

RS: Unless I missed it, the novel contains no early indication of the Eel being blind until its simply stated further along, after she's been discussed several times. As a writer do you like the idea of establishing a character's personality before imparting what could be considered a more noticeable-but-superficial trait, like a handicap?

PS: You got it right. Her blindness is supposed to sort of come out of the blue well after we have already formed a good impression of her, so that the fact of her blindness would not too greatly affect the reader's conception of her. We should understand what she is like as a person before we start to pity her, or to feel superior to her, or to see her in any way as essentially, at her center, determined by her handicap.

RS: There's a line very near the end that struck me, in which the narrator and his wife suddenly voice the idea of breaking off contact with a lifelong friend with whom they've been through a lot. It seems like you were suggesting that relationships can be sustained in suspended animation for decades by unresolved issues, and once that melts away, all you have left is your natural inclination toward that person?

PS: Well, yes, and we understand that one's feelings about someone can change as life moves us all along. Old friends can reveal themselves in ways of no particular interest to oneself. They can become boring -- and you suddenly grasp the sad fact that they were boring all along, only you failed to notice. At that point, you begin to see rather less of them than you had earlier.

RS: There's another interesting aside in the book where, in a somewhat objective voice -- or at least, this isn't disputed -- there's a discussion of how skid row bums aren't really a feature of society anymore, and what that implies. Where did they all go?

PS: To Vermont, maybe, or San Francisco, I don't know, but they are not to be seen very much around New York any more. I think our society became harder and less forgiving, and the indigent bums had to straighten up or die.

RS: It's been a while since I read Black House or the Dark Towerseries, but I think there's a resemblance to the universe of those books here that's unmistakable. Do you agree?

PS: It never occurred to me that A Dark Matter might evoke memories of Black House or the Dark Tower novels. This must be a result of the chaotic, uncontrollable and entirely amoral magic world that is briefly glimpsed by most of the characters. I guess I assume that everything I write takes place in the universe defined by my name.

RS: What's going on these days with The Talisman's movie rights? Steven Spielberg had them for years and apparently couldn't figure out an economically viable way to produce his miniseries?

PS: This matter is a real mystery to me. It's on, it's off, it's definitely on this time, oops, sorry, it's off again. After a while, I stopped thinking about it. No one involved ever communicated with me directly, anyhow.

RS: Why do you think it is that, as an author who found mainstream popularity long ago and has retained it, you remain more or less virgin territory for Hollywood? Do you simply hang up on them when they call?

PS: Hang up, are you kidding? I burn incense, I cross my fingers, I do all I can, but either film people just keep on optioning the same old things over and over, or they shrug and walk away, baffled or annoyed by my unwillingness to tell a story in a straightforward manner. It may be that my books are basically not very promising material for movies. I can live with that, but it would be nice to see someone have another go at it.


A Dark Matter is available in bookstores as of February 9, 2010.

SuicideGirls co-founder Missy will sit down with Kevin Pereira to discuss Apple's recent removal of the SuicideGirls: Flip Strip application from Apple's iTunes store on today's episode of Attack of the Show on G4. The application was recently removed along with about 5,000 other overtly... more

SuicideGirls co-founder Missy will sit down with Kevin Pereira to discuss Apple's recent removal of the SuicideGirls: Flip Strip application from Apple's iTunes store on today's episode of Attack of the Show on G4.

The application was recently removed along with about 5,000 other overtly sexual apps, in accordance with apple's new content guidelines. No definition of those guidelines have been published as of yet.

SuicideGirls Flip Strip App was based on the classic nudie pen concept -- with a high tech twist. It was a cheeky little program, featuring models who stripped down to their underwear when the user's iPhone was inverted, but displayed no actual nudity. The Flip Strip became the fourth most popular free iPhone App at the iTunes store following its release in May 2009. It garnered over 1 million downloads in a matter of days, with total downloads exceeding 5 million before the app was pulled.





Currently you may still download Seduce A SuicideGirl, as well as Playboy's application, but several from Maxim have been removed.

Tune into G4 at 7PM EST to hear Missy's thoughts on the removal.



**Update**

The fabulous folks at Gizmodo have apparently got hold of Apple's new puzzlingly puritanical guidelines, and they make for pretty hilarious reading:

SG particularly likes the ban on men in bikinis. At least this policy is an equal opportunities FAIL. Check Gizmodo's original story for more mockery/details.

(video) SG Radio We Live In Public / Social Networking Special This Sunday This Sunday (Feb 21st), to mark the VOD/DVD release of documentary We Live In Public, a cautionary tale about what can happen when you over-expose yourself online, we're going geek for a social networking special. The film's... more

SG Radio We Live In Public / Social Networking Special This Sunday

This Sunday (Feb 21st), to mark the VOD/DVD release of documentary We Live In Public, a cautionary tale about what can happen when you over-expose yourself online, we're going geek for a social networking special. The film's multi award-winning director, Ondi Timoner, will be calling in to give us some web world dos and don'ts, and to tell us about the special events that are happening to celebrate We Live In Public going public on March 1st. In studio we'll have social media expert Alana Joy, who was recently crowned LA's Most Shameless Self Promoter by the LA Weekly, and uber geek and SG columnist Heathervescent a.k.a. The Purple Tornado.

Listen to SG Radio live Sunday night from 10 PM til Midnight on Indie1031.com.

Got questions? Want to talk to the ladies of SG Radio and their guests? Then dial our studio hotline digits this Sunday between 10 PM and midnight PST: 877-900-1031

Busy on Sunday? Find all our podcasts at SuicideGirlsRadio.Blip.tv/ and listen at your leisure.

And don't forget to friend/follow us on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

****

About

Alana Joy writes, markets, and designs her own fashion blog. You can check it out at CoutureCult.com. She also serves as the hub of an online creative community of her making, LifeOnBlast. She's turned social networking into a lifestyle choice, and has a very busy real world calendar thanks to her myriad of Twitter feeds.

Heathervescent is an internet strategist, marketer, organizer and instigator. She writes about science, technology, culture and cacophony for SuicideGirls and runs a consulting company called The Purple Tornado. Heathervescent relaunched the LA Tech Community, and founded the Los Angeles Geek Dinner mixers. She also has a fledgling performance troupe, Zombies Without Borders, a zombie cabaret that educates and entertains. When the Zombies invade, Heathervescent will be the first to tweet about it.

Ondi Timoner / We Live In Public: Ondi is the only filmmaker to win the Sundance Grand Jury award twice: the first time with DIG! (2004), a film which follows the friendship and careers of bands The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, the second with We Live In Public (2009), a documentary which follows internet pioneer-cum-digital performance artist Josh Harris through the excesses of his personal bubble which spectacularly burst while being broadcast live online.


We Live In Public Screenings and Multi-City / Multi-Media Event

To celebrate the VOD & DVD release of We Live In Public on March 1st, the documentary will be screened simultaneously in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, New York and Atlanta. Adrian Grenier (Entourage) will host the New York event, while Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse) hosts the screening at the Egyptian in Los Angeles. The webcast starts at 5:30 PM PST on WeLiveinPublicTheMovie.com, with screenings starting at 6 PM in Los Angeles, 7 PM in Denver, 8 PM in Chicago, and 9 PM in New York and Atlanta. During these screenings, Ondi and Josh will show exclusive clips and banter wildly from a wired Chicago pod while fielding questions via Twitter live. Post-screening, Ondi and Josh will link up with Adrian and Eliza and all the audiences nationwide in theaters and online to have a live interactive conversation about living in public. For further details go to: WeLiveinPublicTheMovie.com.

The end of the world has been a largely American phenomenon in film and television. Sure, the Australians got their Mad Max and we got a look at England in 28 Days Later, but the usual I Am Legend, The Road, The Book of Eli and Roland Emmerich spectacles have focused on U.S. wastelands. The BBC really... more

The end of the world has been a largely American phenomenon in film and television. Sure, the Australians got their Mad Max and we got a look at England in 28 Days Later, but the usual I Am Legend, The Road, The Book of Eli and Roland Emmerich spectacles have focused on U.S. wastelands.

The BBC really gets their say with the new series Survivors. Based on a 1975 series, the 2010 version tells the story of a worldwide epidemic that leaves only a few survivors. Focusing on England, the series shows a faction of people immune to a flu virus try to pick up the pieces over empty freeways and abandoned neighborhoods.

BBC America debuted the series on Feb. 13 but it's just getting started. Abby Grant (Julie Graham) recovered from the flu to find her husband dead and her son missing. Traveling alone, she crossed paths with Greg Preston (Patterson Joseph) who planned to make a fresh start solo, on his own farm by himself. She convinced him, and a few other survivors, to join up and rebuild together. Upcoming episodes will show the gang making supply runs, fighting territorial hoarders, conflicting with an upstart new government and looking for Abby's son.

Graham and Joseph came to the states to promote the American debut of the show. Sitting outside on the deck at Pasadena, CA's Langham hotel, the Brits found themselves celebrated on a day that also featured professional wrestlers, boxers, Nickelodeon kids, animal handlers and the Simpson family (Jessica, not O.J.) There's a lot of diverse programming on cable so the Brits were happy to have a portion of the spotlight. Catching the January rays available only in southern California, the stars of Survivors actually enjoyed the peace and quiet while other personalities made a commotion in the hotel ballrooms.

Suicide Girls: What are your favorite post-apocalyptic movies or TV shows?

Julie Graham: Day of the Triffids I love. I love Day of the Triffids. I love it, I love it, I love it. Did you see the remake recently? It was really good. Yeah, it got a bit silly but then it is silly, you know, moving plants. But it's really, really well done. And I love The Road.

Patterson Joseph: I was going to say The Road. I haven't seen the movie yet and I desperately want to but the book was phenomenal, the most moving book I've ever read.

JG: The book is fantastic. Have you read the book?

SG: Yeah, I'm sort of a post-apocalyptic junkie.

JG: But also what I quite like about it is the fact that you don't know what's happened. You get glimpses of the world and what happened but you don't actually know what happened. That's what I love about it is that you don't know. You just know there's all this kind of burning and it's been roughly about 10, 12 years.

SG: How have you enjoyed your action hero moments on Survivors?

PJ: Loved it.

JG: Yeah, loved it.

PJ: And the great thing is as well is Adrian [Hodges]'s written really strong female characters as well so it's not just the blokes running around. Everybody gets a chance to run around and then I love exploding cars. Watch that again if you care to. You see me and Max [Beesley] running from that car for our lives. Just look at the faces. Don't worry about the body because we're doing everything to get away from this thing. We were so close to being burned and it was one of those days where everything had been rushed and it was raining all the time and we were running on a mud path. They set this thing alight and went, "Just hang on, guys. Hang on before it gets'" and we could hear it go tsssss as the gas came out before they sparked it up. Both of us looked at each other just like, "Run, run, run." And we went. The look on our faces is just sheer panic running for our lives. I loved it. I loved all the fighting, all the running around. It's great.

SG: Do you enjoy the guns and cars, Julie?

JG: Guns, no. Guns freak me out. I don't like them. Which is probably quite good for my acting skills because when someone points a gun at me, I do get very frightened, even though I know it's fake. But I love all the cars and the chasing, the jeopardy. Guns I don't find sexy at all.

SG: What is the appropriate level of sadness to play here? Obviously you've lost everyone, but at a certain point it wouldn't be fun if it were totally realistic.

JG: It was hard. What I didn't want to do, and the writing helped that a lot, what I was conscious of was that I didn't want her to just become this kind of crying mess at the beginning because that's not actually how people react. People react in different ways to grief but the enormity of what happens to them, you have to have moments of reflection. Some people would kind of collapse in a complete nervous breakdown but that's not really the reality. People can be quite stoic about death and destruction and all that sort of stuff. You've just got to look at what's happening in Haiti now. There's people walking around now in the streets singing, trying to support each other. I think she rises to the occasion in that way. Because she relates to other people so much, her maternal instinct is strong. She wants to support other people as well so she feels protected for instance when she meets Najid, she meets the boy on the motorway. He represents her son so she has to kind of hold it together.

PJ: Also, you do that with the characters though because some of the characters are snowed under by their grief at first which is what happens with Abby. Some of them just go, "I'm just going to cope with it. I'm just going to get through this. Everything's going to be okay. The world is not as terrible as all that. I know I've lost all that but I'm going to carry on going." I think Greg is a bit like that, sort of a swan looking quite sort of serene, but actually underneath is a whole abyss of pain that he's just floating on which eventually sinks into him."

JG: Which I guess is a very male/female thing as well.

PJ: That's a very male thing. You see the way Tom [Beesley's character]reacts. Tom is like if this is the way the world is, that suits me just fine. I'm just going to get on with it. Then there's Anya [Zoe Tapper] who gets crushed by it but then also fights back. So you get the different facets of the human condition in that situation, those who survive emotionally and those who don't in some ways.

SG: How hard was episode 4 for you Julie, when you really deal with not finding your son?

JG: I mean, it's never hard because you're supported by an amazing amount of people but I'm very protective of Abby and I always want to invest her with enough integrity. I was very aware that I didn't want her to become somebody who reacts emotionally to every single situation. But, there are moments in the series that are punctuated by intense pain and grief and I think is the stronger for it. But being with all those kids and stuff is a really difficult thing to think [about]: children being orphaned and left. Those boys, I have to say, were such good fun to work with. It was really hard to dredge up a lot of grief again but it was just a joy to work on the whole series.

SG: I was also going to ask if it was a bit of relief to have that wonderful swimming scene in the lake?

JG: It was quite good fun actually. It was fun and it's kind of nice. It's lovely that the characters get time to breathe. They go away from the group, they separate, they come back together. There's a lot of variety there. You're not just kind of stuck with one group of people together all the time. That's what's so clever about the writing is that it gives the characters opportunities to go off on their own. You kind of see what happens to them and how they relate to other people and the jeopardy they're put in.

SG: Why do you think the new government gets so strict so quickly? Would that happen after a crisis?

JG: We practically live in a police state in Britain. Everything's CCTV. People are being stopped on the street because they're taking pictures of monuments and people think they might be terrorists. I'm finding Britain more and more and more claustrophobic and 1984-ish to live in than it ever was before. So I could easily see the government going that way, especially if we get a new government who are even worse than the old government.

PJ: I felt with people who watch that episode is that they said, "I don't want to live in anarchy. Why would I want to live in a world where anybody with a gun are going to rule the roost. I want somebody to be the strong man and say you can't do this, we're going to send the army in or we're going to send the police in. I want that kind of structure. I don't want to live in chaos."

SG: How would you both fare if it all really ended?

PJ: I'd be okay because I've got all the books that they gave me the first day on survival. So I'd just look at my books and find out how to purify water, make tents and eat bark.

JG: I don't know, I've thought about this so often. I kind of think I'd like to be like Abby. I have this fantasy that I'd just be like her. Now that I've kind of been her, maybe I can rise to the occasion. Another part of me thinks that I'd sort of lock myself in a darkened room and cry a lot, just not go outside.

PJ: You would at first but then Julie, come on, you'd kick it in.

JG: It depends. Joking aside, if my family were gone, I wouldn't want to survive. I just wouldn't. I really wouldn't. I wouldn't want to be part of a world where all my family, my children weren't there. I don't think I could.

SG: Well, let's say it's you and your loved ones. I don't mean to take them away, just do you think you could make it?

JG: If it was me and my family, then I'd be fine. I really, really, all the time I was reading The Road, I just kept saying, "Just shoot your son and kill yourself." That's what I was thinking. "Just kill him and slash your wrists or something or deal with it."

Survivors airs Saturday nights on BBC America.

Some people choose the easiest path through life; David Belle prefers to take the most interesting. As the world's premier exponent of parkour, a physical discipline of movement that's as much a philosophy as it is a sport, Belle has carved a career out of taking the unconventional route. The... more

Some people choose the easiest path through life; David Belle prefers to take the most interesting. As the world's premier exponent of parkour, a physical discipline of movement that's as much a philosophy as it is a sport, Belle has carved a career out of taking the unconventional route.

The freeform method of getting around is based on techniques developed at the turn of the last century by a French navel officer called Georges Hébert. Belle's father picked up the baton laid down by Hébert, building upon his techniques while serving in the French military. The passion for the physical discipline-cum-artform was then passed down from father to son. The latter helped brand l'art du déplacement (or art of movement) with its popular name, bringing "parkour" to the awareness of the mainstream through gravity defying appearances on TV and film. Thrusting parkour further into the popular psyche, Belle's stunts have also been showcased on TV commercials for companies such as Nike, Vittel and the BBC that have since gone viral throughout the net.

In 2004 Belle starred in District 13, a French language action movie co-written and co-produced by Luc Besson (who was responsible for the 1997 sci-fi classic The Fifth Element). District 13 was set in the near future in a fictionalized dystopian suburb of Paris, and was the first major film to feature parkour-inspired action sequences. Belle reprised his role as the gang-busting Leïto in a sequel, District 13: Ultimatum, which was released in Europe last year. Featuring spectacular rooftop chase sequences that should thrill action fans, the film is finally getting a North American theatrical release on Friday, February 5.

We called Belle up at his home in Corbeil-Essonnes, in the southern suburbs of Paris to find out more. With the help of a translator, we spoke about the new movie, the stunts it features, the origins of parkour and where it's taking him now.

Nicole Powers: This is the second movie in the District 13 franchise. How did it come about?

David Belle: Luc Besson called me to see if I was interested in doing a follow up adventure. As far as I was concerned there were no problems at all.

NP: The screenplay was written by Luc Besson, who also wrote The Fifth Element and The Transporter. What did you like about this particular script?

DB: I liked the storyline in general. I thought it was a good action film. The character is a little like me, not in everything, but I felt pretty close to that character, and I was willing to embark on this adventure.

NP: Obviously it's an action-based film. Did you work with Besson in the construction of the action scenes at the writing stage or was it more of a case of collaborating with the film's director, Patrick Alessandrin, at the point when you were preparing to shoot?

DB: As a matter of fact when Luc writes the action he doesn't write that much detail. He leaves us some room for maneuver and he allows us to make some proposals on the action. Then he picks what the best solution is and we move forward like that.

NP: Which was the hardest scene to shoot?

DB: The whole shooting was difficult. Keep in mind we were in top form so in the beginning you do one of these stunts and it's pretty easy. You do the scouting of these scenes and you say, "Ah, that's going to be easy," and you say, "I'm going to do this during the shooting." Then it turns out that something that was initially anticipated as something that was going to be easy turns out to be quite difficult. You've got to be very careful because at the end of the shoot you're exhausted. But we're under the same amount of pressure throughout the whole shoot, however, I should say, since we rehearsed in advance there weren't as many problems as one might have expected.

NP: I guess the issue of physical tiredness is compounded if you have to do multiple takes.

DB: Well yes, that is true. I should add that we tried to spare our forces, save our energy, as much as possible. When we had a stunt scene, we would rehearse the scene two or three times in advance -- everything but the stunt itself. Then we would do the shooting in just one take. We would rehearse it two or three times, when we were all psyched and we were ready, we would hit it and we would just do it. That was our policy for stunts which were really dangerous.

NP: Were there any injuries on set?

DB: I injured my lower arm. We were doing a chase scene in the Gypsy Quarter and there was a police car chasing me. So I'm running and I made a sudden turn and my arm got caught on a doorknob. The doorknob went into my arm. I needed five stitches. The doctor told me I had to rest for a week, but the next day it seemed like the stitches were holding so we started on the roof again.

The thing is, that door was supposed to be closed, but someone has left it half open. So when I was running, just like you might get your bag caught on something that's sticking out, that's what happened with my arm.

NP: Where were the rooftop scenes shot?

DB: On the roofs of Serbia.

NP: Were there any wires or other safety equipment used in those scenes?

DB: There were certain scenes, the scenes that were truly dangerous. Sometimes we had a cable, sometime we had a safety net, because sometimes we would have to rehearse or shoot a scene a couple of times until we got it right. With fatigue setting in you just don't know how you might react, and you're 20 meters up in the air, so sometimes we would shoot with a safety net. But generally speaking, we were free, our movements were free.

NP: The way the action scenes are cut together to pumping techno music, they very much have the feel of a music video. Were you happy with the way everything turned out?

DB: Generally speaking I like the film. As far as the music's concerned, if I'm watching the film and I don't like the music I just turn off the sound and put on a music track that I like. But I would have to say I generally like the music. It really meshes well with the pace of the film I believe.

NP: Going back to how you first started parkour, I know you had military and martial arts training, but how did a type of movement you used to run across town become something that you realized was a stylized thing of its self, something you could make a career out of?

DB: Of course, I was very active in sports when I was small, but it was because of my father that I discovered parkour. It was he who transmitted to me this art though his experience in the army and later as a fireman. He had worked on his own physical conditioning and I realized that the movement has a useful side to it. That you can move around to help people, to aid people, and not just to be an artist or to perform acrobatic tricks. There's a more profound side to parkour.

NP: With parkour there also seems to be a connection to your inner child. If you look at the way a child walks along a pavement, the last thing they want to do is walk in a straight line. They want to jump across cracks in the pavement or play stepping stones, and if there's something to jump up on, instinctively they'll want to jump up on it. Parkour seems to be very much about getting in touch with your inner child and taking the interesting way, rather than the easiest route.

DB: I think you summed it up in a nutshell. That's what it is exactly. That's the first time anybody has given me the proper definition of parkour. Bravo Nicole!

NP: Merci beaucoup! How has it changed since you started doing it? How has the art progressed?

DB: It's sort of like life. Initially the obstacles aren't too high, and as you gradually gain increasing self-assurance and greater amounts of confidence the obstacles are higher, and when you fall it hurts more. So you learn through good technique not to take stupid risks. I didn't ever want to give the impression that practicing this movement is crazy. I wanted to show that there's a method that allows you to overcome obstacles, to navigate obstacles without taking major risks.

NP: What do you do to train on a daily basis?

DB: I've worked on the foundations so much, it's similar to martial arts. When you practice a jump thousands of times for eight hours a day straight, your body develops a memory of it. You don't have to be practicing that everyday from a 20 meter high rooftop. The question for me now is to maintain this physical conditioning. Now I train less. I do it more by feeling. I don't have the same perspective anymore. My goal is to last vis-à-vis my age. I want to make sure that whatever my age is I feel good inside my body, and that I don't have the impression of destroying myself.

NP: Right, you don't want to over-train.

DB: That's right. I don't think it's worthwhile. It's not worth it to over-train. You know, we all have a certain lifespan. It's not like we're going to live 150 or 200 years and I could say, alright, I have 50 years to progress. Life goes by and it's full of things to do, and I don't want to get stagnated and be like an old karate professor who's 70-years old and keeps repeating the same movement. Today I do parkour, tomorrow I might play the piano, maybe the next day I might go fishing. I don't want to feel anchored. I want to continue to move, and of course I want to continue to practice my sport. But I'm trying to listen to my body and I try to always be interested in other things. I don't want to deprive myself of those other things just for the sake of parkour.

NP: I guess part of that goes back to maintaining the enjoyment by nurturing your inner child. It's something that gets forgotten as we get older, but it's important and intrinsic to the discipline too.

DB: Well you know I think everyone has a trigger in their lives and that's what parkour was for me. It's like someone who plays music as a kid, and then, through music, discovers art in general, and beauty. He may not play music [anymore] but he may go on to other things, but the trigger, the detonating influence was music. Well that's what parkour was for me. We all have something that when we're young we discover, and that something will lead us to a world of other discoveries. That's what parkour has done for me. .

NP: So can you see yourself down the line taking acting roles where the physicality is less important? Perhaps even roles that don't requite parkour?

DB: Well if movies give me that opportunity, I would take it up with the greatest of pleasure.

NP: Finally, I know you originally took up parkour with very practical, perhaps even lifesaving applications in mind. Are you doing anything to teach the next generation this skill and the practical applications too?

DB: You're completely right, we're already working with the firemen of Paris imparting parkour techniques, and we've set up a program with the city council of Lisses to set up a place where soldiers, policemen, young people -- anybody engaged in high risk professions -- can come and get training. It's not enough to just train in a gym. There we can move around a bit. We really can't explain the sport in such situations, so these special places we're setting up are much better for that.

NP: Thank you for taking the time out to chat, and good luck with the movie in America.

DB: Merci Nicole.


District 13: Ultimatum opens on limited release in theaters on Friday, February 5. You can also find it on VOD, Amazon, and XBOX Live.